This article describes how to configure a new farm for a search-first migration. The section assumes that you have planned and deployed the new farm to meet the needs of your organization so that you are ready to configure the farm for search. Before you read you read this article, you should be familiar with the information in the preceding articles in this section about search-first migration:

The SharePoint Server 2007 farm that the organization is using in a production environment, with SharePoint enterprise search deployed.

New farm

A new SharePoint Server 2010 farm that you deploy and initially use only for the search-first migration.

Search-first environment

An environment in which a search-first migration is complete. In this environment, end users can use SharePoint Server 2010 search-query features and search-results features when they submit search queries in the original farm or the new farm.

To configure the new farm for a search-first migration, you must do the following:

You must ensure that there is at least one Web application for search. This Web application will consume a Search service application and will host the site collections of one or more Enterprise Search Centers. For performance and governance reasons, we recommend that you configure a Web application that is dedicated to search.

To ensure that a Web application exists for search

Verify that the user account that is performing this procedure is a member of the Farm Administrators group.

On the Home page of the Central Administration Web site, in the Application Management section, click Manage web applications. The Web Applications Management page opens and shows a list of all Web applications in the server farm.

Determine whether there is a Web application in the list that you want to dedicate to search.

Create a Web application to dedicate to search if one does not already exist.

Note

When you use the Farm Configuration Wizard to create a site collection, the wizard automatically creates a Web application named SharePoint – 80. You can dedicate this Web application for search, or you can create a different Web application for this purpose. For more information, see Create a Web application (SharePoint Server 2010).

To determine whether there is an Enterprise Search Center site in the farm, go to the Central Administration home page, click Application Management, and then in the Site Collections section, click View all site collections.

Browse to the top-level site of each site collection. If none of the top-level sites is an Enterprise Search Center site and none of those sites has a tab named Search, do the following:

Create an Enterprise Search Center site by doing one of the following:

To crawl user profiles that are in the original farm, do the following:

To crawl user profiles that are in the original farm:

Create a content source in the new farm that you will configure for crawling user profiles in the original farm.

In the content source, add the start address for crawling the user profiles that are in the original farm. The start address should be in the following form: sps3://<HostName> where <HostName> is the name of the server in the original farm that hosts My Sites.

If the default content access account does not have permission to crawl the user profiles that are in the original farm, do one of the following:

Use the following procedure to crawl user profiles that are in the new farm.

To crawl user profiles that are in the new farm

In the new farm, create a content source that you want to use for crawling user profiles in the new farm.

In the content source, add the start address for crawling the user profiles that are in the new farm. The start address should be in the following form:
sps3://<HostName>
where <HostName> is the name of the server in the new farm that hosts My Sites.

To enable users to get search results for queries that contain social tags, the Web application that is associated with the Search service application must be connected to a Managed Metadata service application. For information about how to set up this configuration, see the following articles: